


A Choice of Poisons

by Dien



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Angst, Drinking, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Ominous Foreshadowing, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-08
Updated: 2013-11-08
Packaged: 2017-12-31 20:32:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1036073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dien/pseuds/Dien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written prior to S1E022, and Grace therefore does not exist. Features definitely-gay!Harold, and straight!Nathan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Choice of Poisons

Nathan Ingram drinks, and Harold wishes he didn't.  
  
Not that he's a teetotaller himself. Not exactly. He drinks because Nathan does; because Nathan pours him a glass of whiskey when he pours his own each night, because Nathan wants to toast with champagne, because Nathan insists he try this or that vintage with the five-hundred dollar dinners. His first experience with alcohol was Nathan-- a party, back at MIT, where he'd spoken to almost nobody at all but kept nervously downing the beers Nathan had kept offering him.  
  
He drinks _socially_ , as the saying is, except that his social circle is pretty much Nathan.  
  
There had been a few years where he had liked being drunk-- the way it had made him relax, the way it had made things easier, the warmth, the bits where Nathan would start laughing helplessly and he would too and it'd be silly and light and simple and _normal_ in a way he had had very little experience of...   
  
That had been college, mostly, and a year or so after it.   
  
These days he feels vaguely like Nathan should have grown out of it by now. He still drinks what Nathan pours, but it's indulging his best friend as much as any desire for the liquor or the intoxication. He prizes his clarity of thought; Nathan, on the other hand, seems more and more almost to need that point in the day at which he can kill off a few brain cells. Which is worrying.  
  
So when Nathan comes into his office with a bottle of scotch in one hand and two glasses in the other, very late on a Thursday, Harold purses his lips at his monitor and keeps typing. He doesn't really want a glass of scotch. He'd much rather get this code cleaned up.   
  
Nathan comes up behind his desk and leans down over his shoulder to peer at the screen. Harold feels warm breath ruffle his hair, his ear, and can smell that Nathan's already had at least one glass.  
  
The other reason he wishes that Nathan didn't drink is that he gets... touchy.  
  
(And perhaps this, too, had been part of the reason that he had liked it, once upon a time: Nathan's arm slung over his shoulder, that long body bumping his own in easy intimacy. Innocent, of course. Frustratingly, damnably innocent.)  
  
When Harold had been young and stupid and naïve and elated just to be Nathan Ingram's _friend_ , it had been thrilling. Made butterflies swim in the alcohol in his stomach.  
  
Now it's more like picking at a scab.  
  
Nathan Ingram studies the lines-upon-lines of code for a few seconds and then says, “The Prinsky project? I thought the object-marker problems had been worked out.”  
  
Sometimes he forgets that Nathan is good with computers, which is silly of him, and arrogant too. Nathan is sharply intelligent and a more-than-competent programmer (although his genius really lies in management), but Harold has become accustomed to being so far beyond other people that it surprises him when Nathan asks insightful questions, and then he feels guilty for being surprised.  
  
“I was looking over the logs from the beta testers and noticed some potential issues with drive compatibility,” Harold answers, fingers never breaking rhythm. “It shouldn't be an issue for 99% of users, but the workaround's pretty simple to kludge together and that's one less bug to release a patch for.”  
  
(Nathan's hand is on the back of his chair. Thumb resting against his spine. He resists the urge to shift away from it.)  
  
“You do know that we employ an _army_ of programmers to do clean-up like this, don't you? I live in hopes of the day you learn to delegate, Harold.”  
  
“I don't mind doing it.”  
  
Nathan chuckles (again he can feel it on his hair, it tickles, _don't scratch_ ), shakes his head. The weight of Nathan's hand disappears, as does the warmth of Nathan's body, the brush of his tie against Harold's arm. Harold watches the other man's reflection in his monitor, his rolling walk to the couch and his easy descent down into it.  
  
Unlike Harold, Nathan is a _graceful_ drunk, which somehow makes it even more irritating.  
  
“Well, when you're done, or hit a good stopping point, come have a drink. Senator Russwood has presented his compliments, and they are in the form of an exquisite 20-year-old single malt.”  
  
“How generous of him.”  
  
“ _I_ thought so,” Nathan murmurs, and Harold hears the slosh of liquid, the glasses being poured.   
  
He types for four more minutes, to make some sort of point to himself, then sighs and saves and slides his chair back from his desk.   
  
Nathan holds out a glass of gold to him and he takes it before sitting. The couch's expensive leather sinks beneath his weight, cushions him, makes him relax despite himself. His name may not be on the door, but that doesn't mean he hasn't splurged on a few creature comforts.   
  
The scotch _is_ pretty good. He closes his eyes as it burns all the way down, slow tendrils of heat uncurling through his body. As usual he has sat at the computer for too long and the change in position sends pins and needles through parts of him.   
  
“To Senator Russwood, I suppose,” he murmurs, and opens his eyes again.   
  
“To Senator Russwood,” Nathan agrees with a lopsided grin, and they touch glasses and the second sip goes down like the first. Harold slides his eyeglasses off and rubs at the bridge of his nose.  
  
“I'm serious, Harry. Learn to hand this stuff off, it's a goddamned waste for _you_ to be working on things a Cal Tech kid could be doing for twenty bucks an hour.” Nathan regards him seriously from the other end of the couch, or as serious as he can from his boneless slouch with his tie loosened, his shirt's top buttons popped. (Harold looks away.)  
  
“Some people relax by--” _drinking_ , he almost says, but doesn't, catches it on the edge of his tongue and hunts for a different word in the depths of his glass. “--getting massages, Nathan. I relax by coding.”  
  
“You're not relaxed,” Nathan retorts, with a dismissive snort for his bullshit and Harold smiles despite himself, a little smile into the whiskey. Buzzed or not, Nathan knows him better than anyone else. Better than he's ever let anyone else know him.  
  
“Alright, I'm not relaxed. How should I unwind?” he asks, lightly.  
  
Nathan gestures with his glass in answer, almost spills a bit. “Come out on the yacht. This weekend. Will's coming, bringing his little girlfriend. You can bring what's-his-name, Alex? Is it Alex?”  
  
Harold feels a flash of multiple emotions, each competing like different processes for system resources: irritation, amusement, bemusement... under them the little frisson of tension he feels anytime Nathan makes even oblique reference to his orientation, to the fact that an 'orientation' exists for him at all.  
  
Not that Nathan isn't accepting. Quite the opposite. Nothing but supportive. Goes out of his way to show it's not a _problem_ , Harry, I should introduce you to a friend--  
  
Which, come to think of it, is how he had met Alan in the first place.  
  
“You _introduced_ us, Nathan; you can't remember his name?” He chooses to focus on amusement; it's safest, just keep it to teasing, easy and light. “Alan. Not Alex. And I don't... I doubt that... yachts are his thing.”  
  
“Well, you could _ask_ him.”  
  
He could. Harold takes another swallow from his scotch, eyes traveling back to his monitor, mind traveling back to the workaround. Data packets flow along simple lines--  
  
“....you two are still...”  
  
Right. Irritation flares back up, jockeying for dominance again. Harold closes his eyes for a second, and envisions long strings of binary and the world resolving itself into simplicity, into one and zero, on and off, no complexities and no shades of gray and no unfinished questions hanging in the air while Nathan Ingram, damn him, tries to be a good and supportive friend because he knows that he _should_ be and Nathan Ingram is an ethical man who does what he _should_ and sometimes it really, really drives Harold crazy.  
  
“We're...” Harold studies his glass, turning it in his fingers to watch the crystal catch the light, see the whiskey glow amber. “...taking a break.”  
  
“A break, or a..... break?”  
  
Harold huffs beneath his breath and pushes himself back against the leather. This is not one of their more eloquent conversations. Drunk Nathan also thinks that pregnant pauses are acceptable substitutions for nouns and verbs.   
  
“A 'he-would-like-to-see-other-people' sort-of-break,” Harold clarifies tersely. He doesn't know what annoys him more, Nathan's well-meaning attempts to set him up with men or the so-casual attempts to find out how these relationships are going.  
  
He's considered various ways to handle this. One of them involves programming Nathan's alarm clock to play an mp3 while he sleeps that says over and over _I'm not pining miserably over you, you insufferable bastard, so for the love of Turing stop trying to clumsily find someone for me._   
  
Considered, and rejected. Nathan means well. Nathan means well, which is a good mantra to repeat to himself at moments like this. But he wishes to hell Nathan would just leave the whole issue completely alone.   
  
Nathan Ingram drinks, and Harold does too, but he never gets drunk anymore. One night of stupid confessions that can never be unsaid, of fumbling attempts at a kiss, is enough for one lifetime. He has no desire to risk compounding the issue.   
  
“So your dinner with the senator went well,” he asks before Nathan can stumble through an _I'm sorry_ or anything similar. A stupid statement, but it does the job, it signals however crudely that he's done talking about this. Nathan stares at him a few seconds, then takes another swallow from his own glass and looks elsewhere.  
  
“Very well. He said he'll do his best to make sure IFT's got an edge in the bidding on any more DOD projects that come our way. Oh, and we've got a meeting next week with someone from the NSA; we're swimming upstream through the alphabet soup. Lovely woman, though.”  
  
He pauses to decipher Nathan's jumps, his brows furrowing over his glasses. “ _You_ have a meeting with someone from the NSA. Someone Russwood brought?”  
  
Nathan has that easy smile on his face that he often gets when he's encountered a woman he finds attractive (which is most of them, in Harold's estimation). “Yeah. Name's Corwin. Alicia. I think you'd like her; she's tough. Clever. Doesn't like me... yet.”   
  
Harold hides his own snort in his glass. “As I'm not going to meet her, it is a moot point, but I _will_ remind you your divorce proceedings are still ongoing and you might want to keep that in mind for your meeting with... Miss? Corwin.”  
  
“I think she'd prefer to be called agent.”  
  
“ _Agent_ Corwin. The point stands. Don't screw around, Nathan. Did _Agent_ Corwin say what her agency wants from IFT?”  
  
“I'll refrain from bringing her flowers. And she was pretty cagey-- said it was a 'data processing' issue and asked a few questions about the pattern-recognition stuff IFT did for satellite mapping...” Nathan sips, watching him over his glass's rim. “Any guesses?”  
  
Harold purses his lips. “A few, yes. Something to do with surveillance is likely. We taught computers in the sky to recognize roads and power plants, the NSA likely wants to know if we can teach computers on subways to recognize explosives. Or sweaty palms.”  
  
“Teach a machine to pick up on sweat on a New York subway and you'll have a false positive system like none other.”  
  
They both laugh. Harold is feeling the alcohol despite himself-- the warmth has curled down to his toes, the screen is no longer quite so tempting. Sitting with his friend and partner is not unpleasant. He even catches himself thinking with slight wistfulness of Alan, of calling him up, seeing if he's free tonight...  
  
No, no. Better this way. Not like what they'd had could have been called a _relationship_ , not when Alan doesn't even know such human things as what he actually does for a living.   
  
Better to let it go as he lets all his interactions go. Let them slide past him, water to his own innate oil, molecules drifting past each other with no lasting bond. The only element he makes contact with is the man sitting across the couch from him, and that is how Harold wants his world to stay.  
  
“Well, see what they want, anyway. I'm intrigued,” he says, and fights a yawn.  
  
“She's coming to the office on Tuesday. I could give her one of your James Bond pens.”  
  
“No. Too risky that she might actually realize what it is, and then we-- well, _you_ \-- have some awkward questions to answer.”  
  
Nathan laughs, warm, from his belly. “Not everyone's as paranoid as you, Harry.”  
  
“In the NSA, they damn well ought to be. No, I'll just watch from my Batcave, thank you.”  
  
“More like a Fortress of Solitude.”  
  
The joke hits a few seconds too soon after his own thoughts on Alan and Harold finishes off what's left in his glass in one ambitious swallow. It burns like dickens; he closes his eyes.   
  
He feels the couch shift as Nathan does, hears the bottle lifted from the coffee table, the wet gurgle as Nathan refills his own cup. After a second's hesitation, he holds his own out as well. Why the hell not. Nathan's fingers brush against his, in the exchange of the glass, and Harold keeps his eyes shut.   
  
The couch settles again, Nathan settles, the silence is tolerable so of course Nathan speaks, reaching out one foot to nudge against his own like they were still freshmen.  
  
“That's Tuesday, though. Still leaves the weekend. Come out on the boat with us. Don't leave me out there with Will making googly eyes at his gal.”  
  
He wants to say no. The last thing he wants is several days fighting off mild seasickness and having Internet access only with an aircard. There's a mountain of things he could be doing at work-- including learning everything he can about someone named 'Alicia Corwin'-- and also, he sunburns horribly. And he hates fishing.  
  
Harold takes another sip of the scotch. Warm in his throat, in his belly, in his cheeks.  
  
“Alright.”  
  
Nathan had obviously readied another argument, and blinks for a second before grinning at him, pleased as punch. It's a grin that makes other people smile in answer, men and women alike; a grin that hasn't changed much at all from MIT, from thirty-and-change years ago, even if the face surrounding that grin has aged.   
  
It's a grin that still makes butterflies cavort drunkenly in his stomach.   
  
Damn Nathan, anyway.   
  
And damn himself too, for still being so easily intoxicated by him, for still drinking down what Nathan Ingram pours out.


End file.
